The Dreaming

That’s harder than it sounds. At comic-book conventions, the faithful are very faithful–frighteningly so, unless you’re accustomed to seeing grown men dressed as wood elves and Wookiees. And at this particular convention, the world’s largest, the faithful are also legion: 75,000 are in attendance. Gaiman’s devotees–who skew young, female, and Goth, but also include middle-class families and seniors in wheelchairs–know his trademark leather jacket and his black anemone of hair on sight, and just a glimpse won’t do. Some fly around the country just to bask in his presence. Others– like Tori Amos–are content with friendship. Still others–like Robert Zemeckis and Harvey Weinstein–just like being in business with the guy. And a select few want his name permanently etched on their bodies. (Gaiman once signed a man’s arm, only to see him return a few hours later with the autograph freshly tattooed, the i’s dotted with beads of blood.) The fervor isn’t entirely unwarranted: Gaiman has given them all something to believe in.

Specifically, he’s given them The Sandman, first published by DC Comics (owned by EW parent company Time Warner) in 1988, brought to an end in 1996, and which has haunted bookstores in 10 graphic novels ever since. It was one of the first comics to find a large female readership: Gaiman claims it was “sexually transmitted” as boyfriends gave it to their girlfriends to show them that comics were for grown-ups, too. Sandman was among the first to include an array of substantive gay characters. And it’s the only comic book ever to win a prose-fiction prize (the 1991 World Fantasy award for short story).

Sandman attempts to explain the jagged joys and arbitrary horrors of human life thusly: The cosmos is run by a dysfunctional family. (Now it all makes sense, doesn’t it?) They’re the Endless–not gods, exactly, but ineluctable aspects of existence, personified: lonely Dream; cheerful Death; stolid Destiny; treacherous, androgynous Desire; morbidly obese Despair; on-the-lam Destruction; and batty, punky Delirium (who was once Delight, but you know how that goes).

Gaiman probably could have started a church on his Sandman following. But, bless him, the guy loves story more than scripture. His restless imagination forged on to create the apocalyptic comedy Good Omens (coauthored with Terry Pratchett), the New York Times best-seller American Gods, and the Hugo award-winning children’s book Coraline, not to mention scores of short stories, poems, audio plays, and the BBC TV miniseries-turned-novel, Neverwhere. He has also just released a best-selling children’s book, The Wolves in the Walls. And that’s not even touching the half-dozen Gaiman- related projects currently slouching towards Hollywood. But what has his acolytes rejoicing is The Sandman: Endless Nights–a new 160-page hardcover graphic novel that marks Gaiman’s first real return to Sandman since he ended the series seven years ago.

Gives some credence to the whole omnipresence thing. Not to mention the whole universal adoration thing. “Neil is the kind of man who inspires other people, myself included, with strong feelings of affection, even love,” says Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. “He is big-souled. And, also, really, really cute.”

But not overly cute, Amos is quick to point out. “Neil the writer can be a nice guy–but he’s quite dangerous,” says the singer, who was one of Gaiman’s inspirations for the manic Delirium. “I think the nice guy is a cover so the writer can be protected from the public, and the public from the writer.”

But there’s precious little protection going on today at Comic- Con: The throng is closing in, and while Gaiman’s spirit may be willing, his flesh is dog-tired and desperately in need of sushi. Concluding an address to an auditorium of a thousand fans, he must be escorted from the room by a small militia of Klingons (the Hell’s Angels of comic-book conventions). He’s whisked briskly down the hall to an autograph table, where a thousand more supplicants are lined up. But along the way, he takes a moment to contemplate Death. In the world of Sandman–and the world of Gaiman–this is actually a pleasant thing, as Death of the Endless is an adorable chalk-white, black-clad Goth girl.

“Hello, you look wonderful!” he exclaims, posing for a picture with a fan dressed as the Undiscover’d Country From Whose Bourn No Traveler Returns. Death giggles, but does not blush. Of course, a mainstream observer could dismiss all of this as cult adulation. But how big does a cult have to get before it becomes bona fide religion?

One of the things people miss about every system of belief is that it’s true. Absolutely true.” Gaiman is recalling his religious upbringing, which he characterizes as “messy, and primarily Jewish.” After a bookish childhood spent acing religious studies at a deeply Anglican school and inhaling C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Gaiman was packed off to London for bar mitzvah training with an Orthodox cantor. He found he had a spongelike memory for mythic Judaica, and later incorporated this acquired midrashic wisdom into the mythos of Sandman. (”I got people coming to me and saying, ‘How do you know that?’ I just thought everyone knew that Adam had three wives and the middle one never even got a name….”)

Later, as a young London journalist, Gaiman discovered a form that would accommodate that confusion: comic books. He marveled at the work of Alan Moore, author of such milestones as Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Moore’s early-’80s Swamp Thing comics inspired Gaiman to try his own hand at it. In 1986, Gaiman teamed with artist Dave McKean (who would become a longtime collaborator) to publish the graphic novel Violent Cases, about dark memories of childhood. The book caught the eye of Karen Berger, Moore’s editor and DC Comics’ liaison to Britain’s word-balloon literati. She indulged Gaiman’s desire to revisit an obscure 1940’s crime fighter called the Sandman, who knocked out thugs with sleeping gas.

Gaiman’s Sandman–first depicted by artists Mike Dringenberg and Sam Kieth as pale, thin, and raven-haired, with starlit hollows for eyes–didn’t go in for wham! pow! fisticuffs. As the lord of dreams and stories (called Dream, Morpheus, and many other names), he found himself embroiled in cosmic politics, tangling with ethereal notables from Lucifer to Norse deities Odin and Thor. “I just kept adding things, seeing if it would hold,” recalls Gaiman, who approached the comic with an “everything is true, everything is now” mind-set. “I thought, Let’s put Shakespeare in there. Okay, that worked. Well, surely I won’t be able to add the Norse gods…no, that worked too. But I certainly won’t get away with angels….”

He got away with angels, and more. In a typical Sandman tale (if such a thing exists), a caliph ruling the magical Baghdad of legend asks Dream to preserve his perfect realm forever. He gets his wish: The shimmering city remains only in dreams, leaving the crumbling Baghdad of today for waking eyes to see. “It’s a perfect legend,” enthuses Moore. “It’s so good that it shouldn’t really even have a writer. It should be one of those stories that’s just always been there.”

“Neil has a patent on the mythic at the moment,” says friend and fan Stephin Merritt, of Magnetic Fields fame. “Knowing Neil is like knowing Thor. I never tell anyone I’m friends with him because they’ll think I’m bragging.”

Knowing Thor–really knowing him–means visiting western Wisconsin, and finding a house that doesn’t want to be found: a rambling Victorian with a wraparound porch and a frowsy pack of watch-cats. Gaiman has lived here since 1992 with Mary McGrath, his American wife of 18 years, and their 9-year-old daughter, Maddy. (Eighteen-year-old Holly and 20-year-old Mike have already left the nest.) Gaiman likes the remoteness and often eschews air travel for the train “to get a sense of the vastness of the country.”

Nearby, there’s a town, but just barely: It’s little more than a suture in the countryside, with narrow roads stitched across. Gaiman trolls these corn-lined byways in his new black Mini Cooper, which looks about as alien to these parts as, well, a pale, black- clad Englishman. “You are on an undigitized road,” his Global Positioning System informs him. “Odd,” he says, “I thought all roads were digitized nowadays.”

Getting a fix on the man Alan Moore calls a “gothic butterfly” must be a challenge for the GPS: It’s that pesky omnipresence again. For, after seeing Endless Nights ship more than 100,000 copies for DC, Gaiman will be (a) prepping to direct a film based on his Sandman spin-off Death: The High Cost of Living for Warner Bros.; (b) working on an adaptation of Nicholson Baker’s erotic novel The Fermata with Zemeckis; and (c) pecking away at a new book, Anansi Boys. (There’s no room here for the d’s, e’s, and f’s.) Meanwhile, the Jim Henson Company is in postproduction on his fantasy script MirrorMask. Harvey Weinstein wants to make Gaiman’s short story “Chivalry” into a movie that the mogul himself plans to direct. Any second now, it seems, Gaiman will be everywhere, a Media Oversoul.

“You have arrived,” the GPS informs him. He hasn’t, though. The Mini sits at a crossroads. “You have arrived,” the computer repeats. Gaiman doesn’t listen. He just smiles and keeps driving.

Sidebar: THIS WAY IN TO THE WORLD OF NEIL GAIMAN

The Neil Gaiman universe is a vast and varied one. His website, neilgaiman.com, details his bibliography, but here are three easy ways to see what the hubbub’s about.

THE SANDMAN: SEASON OF MISTS While it isn’t the first Sandman book (that’d be Preludes & Nocturnes), Season is the first to tell a fairly straightforward story; it introduces the Endless clan, Dream’s romantic track record, and a Lucifer looking for a career change.

AMERICAN GODS Gaiman puts his passion for (and scary knowledge of) myth to good use. This sprawling novel follows an ex-con with nothing to lose who hits the road with an old Norse deity with everything to gain. An Englishman’s love of Americana is vividly evident.

The high road to Gaimanland, however, is The Sandman, a comic book series compiled into a 10-volume set of graphic novels (plus ancillary books). To people who care about comics, “The Sandman” needs no introduction; it is a beloved, seminal work that bridged the gap between the form’s pop mainstream and its experimental fringe.

But, to be blunt, I’m not someone who cares much about comics. Despite having read and admired works by Art Spiegelman, Los Bros Hernandez, Alan Moore, Chester Brown, Chris Ware and others, I still belong to that tribe of readers who’ll pick a thousand words over a picture any day. I never would have sought out “The Sandman” if I hadn’t already been enchanted by “Neverwhere,” American Gods (Gaiman’s 2001 novel for adults) or the sublime Coraline, the children’s book he published last year.

Since those last two titles both hit the New York Times bestseller list, I’m surely not the only reader to first fall in love with Gaiman’s imagination via the medium of plain prose. Somehow, though, he hasn’t quite registered on the public’s consciousness as decisively as he ought to. He is, as one journalist put it, the famous author you’ve never heard of, a baffling fact in the age that made J.K. Rowling its darling.

Perhaps it’s Gaiman’s comics background that puts some people off, a prejudice in danger of being cemented by the publication this month of The Sandman: Endless Nights, a collection of graphic stories based in the Sandman universe. But Gaiman’s ongoing fondness for the medium shouldn’t discourage comics-wary readers from exploring his work; instead, the appearance of “Endless Nights” should be the occasion for confirmed prose junkies — Gaiman aficionados and novices alike — to make a foray, however brief, off the reservation. Trust me, it’s well worth the trip.

To newcomers, “Endless Nights” on its own probably won’t convey the allure of the Sandman epic. It’s a lovely hardcover collection, illustrated by some major artists in the field, but it feels a bit like a commemorative souvenir program to the main event. DC Comics’ arty imprint, Vertigo, makes the whole Sandman series available in 10 paperbacks, and that’s the place for novices to dive in, with Volume 1, Preludes and Nocturnes. Stick with it through Volume 2, The Doll’s House, and you’ll be hooked.

Gaiman sees himself as part of the age-old profession of storytellers, but unlike a lot of the tiresome people who go around referring to themselves that way, he’s right. His fiction, in its various media (he also writes screen- and radio plays), induces that blissful, semi-hypnotic state most of us first experienced as children, when the power of a book seemed to erase the world around us, and when reading felt almost like a drug. Gaiman is interested in all the traditional forms of storytelling — legends, folk and fairy tales, myth — and not just in the stories themselves, but the ways they get told. Not surprisingly, the hero of the Sandman epic is Morpheus, the King of Dreams, who also presides over stories.

Gaiman certainly wasn’t the first comics writer to draw on ancient myths, but he could be the first to really understand how myths work, not just as motifs but as nodes of meaning that gain new layers as we attach new experiences to old stories. For example, the Egyptian god Osiris, the Norse god Balder, Jesus and John F. Kennedy are all very different figures and yet — in some fundamental way having to do with how we understand them — also the same. As the British writer C.S. Lewis (a major influence on Gaiman) pointed out, a myth is a story that can be told and retold in very different ways and yet remain essentially intact. There is no original or correct version of the Orpheus myth, just countless ways of revealing it, and even people who haven’t heard the traditional Greek version recognize it as something powerful when they meet it in another form.

Gaiman’s fiction is teeming with gods — most memorably the has-been deities eking out a meager living in the contemporary United States of “American Gods” — but Dream isn’t one of them. He’s more of an embodied principle of existence, one of seven siblings, the Endless, who also include Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Destruction and Delirium. There’s a real danger of ludicrous grandiosity in this premise, but Gaiman counterbalances all the metaphysics with a quotidian funkiness. On one page the Sandman may be facing off against Lucifer in Hell, but soon enough he’ll be sulking at a family gathering or bickering with Desire, who thinks he’s a humorless stuffed shirt.

Perhaps Gaiman’s most popular creation is Dream’s older sister, Death, an adorable, ankh-wearing punkette who kindly leads the newly deceased to their fate. Death is the sensible, peace-making, considerate sibling among the Endless, and when she first appeared in the comic’s eighth issue, she became an instant hit. As Dream sits glumly in lower Manhattan’s Washington Square Park (he’s in the doldrums after completing a major quest), she shows up to give him a good talking-to, accusing him of being “the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane.”

“The Sandman” keeps doing this, balancing the callow satisfactions of conventional genres with a playful argument against the kind of personality that makes someone obsess about such things to begin with. At its most limited, pop culture directed at men is a shabby little tango between fantasies of mastery and self-pity (”Only I can save the world, and yet I can never truly be part of it” — that sort of thing). Gaiman can play that tune, but he keeps introducing new and more challenging partners and steps.

Morpheus, for example, is the epitome of late-adolescent Goth cool, a gaunt, chalk-skinned, ebony-haired hipster who can brood with the best of them — plus he has superpowers! Yet the entire Sandman epic is also an elucidation of Morpheus’ emotional and personal failures (romantic as well as familial), culminating in his recognition of his own isolation and obsolescence. Similarly, “Neverwhere” is partly an old-fashioned boy’s adventure story, but the hero is neither especially brave nor notably gifted, just an ordinary fellow whose only sterling quality is kindness. Gaiman the author points his readers toward a richer, more grown-up way of understanding life and stories than that offered by tortured superheroes, alienated loners or strapping champions. Some say that Morpheus looks a bit like his creator, but Gaiman’s secret twin is Death, a witty, charming escort to the next stage of our existence.

For Gaiman, one of the chief uses of enchantment is not to escape from the real world, but to illuminate it. In “Neverwhere,” when Richard, by association with its scruffy denizens, joins the world of London Below, he also becomes, if not quite invisible, at least profoundly unmemorable and radically unremarkable to the inhabitants of London Above. That’s only a slight tweak on the actual world: I walked past a homeless man yesterday who held up a sign reading “Everyone ignores me.” He lives in New York Below.

Much of what passes as fantastic literature these days doesn’t maintain any fertile relationship with the real. Even the classic works of British fantasy that Gaiman uses as touchstones, the novels of Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton, to name a few, feel insular, like retreats from the world into an imaginary realm untouched by modernity. Gaiman, on the other hand, is ever eager to expand his compass and take in everything, the new mixing exuberantly with the old. “The Sandman” contains everything from vamps on old-time horror comics, to ersatz (but convincing) African folk tales to references to the devastation of the first Gulf War to snapshots of urban life featuring single mothers, transvestites and a touchingly devoted pair of lesbian lovers. In “Neverwhere,” London’s Tube becomes as mysterious, romantic and perilous as Olde England’s Forest of Arden.

Nevertheless, Gaiman has never lost touch with the spellbinding voice of classic British fantasy. He reproduces it perfectly in “Coraline,” his most polished piece of writing yet, as far as prose is concerned; every sentence is distilled to its essence. Gaiman, like Lewis, builds his narratives from images; even when the connective tissue doesn’t hold up (as it sometimes doesn’t in “American Gods” and mostly doesn’t in the fairytale-like novel “Stardust”), the individual pictures retain their potency.

In “Coraline,” a little girl wanders through a magical door in her family’s sitting room to discover a replica of her house on the other side, presided over by her “other mother,” a sinister and overly affectionate person with shiny black buttons instead of eyes. The other mother holds her captive, demanding that Coraline acquire her own pair of buttons. It’s a very, very creepy book, but also funny and, despite its weirdness, true to life about the way certain adults treat children. A friendly if sarcastic cat explains the other mother’s motivations to Coraline: “She wants something to love, I think … Something that isn’t her. She might want something to eat as well. It’s hard to tell with things like her.”

“American Gods,” Gaiman’s most recent major novel, shows how this generous and resourceful writer keeps enlarging his scope. The task he sets for himself — building a fantastic epic on a core of mythic material that feels authentically American — is a tough one. The revelation in the novel’s climax doesn’t ring entirely true, but the method Gaiman uses to get there does.

The battered hero of classic hardboiled detective fiction is, in a way, the Hercules of our time. Gaiman sends a man like that, ex-con Shadow Moon, into noir’s typically skanky situations, and sets him up for the usual rounds of beatings and betrayals. But Shadow’s companions and adversaries in these adventures are a multicultural potluck of defunct gods and demons, withering away due to lack of worshippers, hustling and grifting in order to get by while they plot their big comeback. Not only did Gaiman learn enough about an obscure dualistic Slavic deity to slip him into the novel, he also researched enough about prison life to make Shadow’s memories of that seem convincing as well.

That’s the message of Neil Gaiman’s essential comic book, The Sandman, which gets a loving, exhaustive and informed tribute in The Sandman: King Of Dreams, from assistant editor Alisa Kwitney.

A cross between a primer and retrospective, King Of Dreams traces its history from the inside, reprinting panels, Gaiman’s notes, and artists’ sketches. Over its 2,000-page run, this epic told the story of Morpheus, an immortal caught in a complex, political saga with his six siblings, including perky sister Death.

Featuring serial killer conventions, delusional superheroes and a Devil who’s bored of running Hell, its influence can still be seen today in similarly out-there works like Fables and Alan Moore’s Promethea.

If there are goth sensibilities, with Death and Dream spending eternity in all-black ensembles, it’s more Cocteau Twins than the Mission, with Dave McKean’s distinctive cover art lending a classy, lush 4AD sensibility. A perfect primer for The Sandman: Endless Nights, a new collection, out in October.

By the time he was a teenager, Gaiman had refined those goals. When he was queried one day on his career aspirations by a high-school counselor, Gaiman responded that he wanted to “write American comics.”

“There was a very long pause. Nobody had ever said that to him before,” Gaiman laughingly recalled in a recent interview. “Then he said, ‘Have you ever thought about accountancy?’ “

Fortunately for the literary world, Gaiman ignored the advice. After leaving school, he worked as a journalist before launching the groundbreaking comic Sandman series in 1988. The series, published by DC Comics, ran for 10 years and attracted millions of fans, including writer Norman Mailer, who called it “a comic strip for intellectuals.”

Over the years, Gaiman, 42, also has written several adult novels, including American Gods, Neverwhere and Stardust. In 1997, he turned his talents to the children’s-book world, publishing a picture book titled The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish.

Last year, Gaiman’s children’s novella, Coraline, was published to critical and popular acclaim, and recently won a Hugo award. Now Gaiman has just published a second picture book, The Wolves In the Walls (HarperCollins, $16.99).

The book, illustrated by Gaiman’s frequent collaborator, Dave McKean, has received top reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist. But Gaiman also has encountered flak from some adults who believe the book is too scary for children. Ironically, Gaiman got the idea for the book when his then 4-year-old daughter woke up one night terrified from a nightmare about the wolves in her walls.

“It was one of those ’sticky’ dreams that stay with you,” Gaiman said. “So I started making up stories about wolves and walls to cheer her up.”

Like much of Gaiman’s work, “Wolves” assumes there is an eerie universe of supernatural beings just beyond the visible world. In this case, it’s a pack of wolves that is living in the walls. The book’s young heroine, Lucy, can hear the wolves trying to come out into the open, but no one in her family wants to believe her.

Eventually, the wolves do come out of the walls and take over the house. The family is forced to flee and ends up inside the walls themselves until the resourceful Lucy decides that she’s had enough and convinces her parents and brother to fight back.

Despite the chilling premise, Gaiman manages to inject a huge dose of humor into the text. McKean’s illustrations, an antic mix of collage, drawing, photography and painting, offer a similar balance of humor and horror.

“Some people say, ‘How can you justify showing little kids this book?’ And I respond that little kids really think it’s a funny book,” Gaiman said. “I plead guilty to giving adults nightmares. I have not seen any evidence yet of that happening to children.”

Gaiman believes that too many adults just don’t understand children’s fears.

“People tell me that this book will have children worrying that there are things under their beds. Are you telling me that there is a kid out there who doesn’t believe there are things under their beds? It’s not like I made this stuff up,” Gaiman said, paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton’s statement that fairy tales don’t tell children there are dragons and monsters out there.

“Children know they are there, and they’ve always known. What fairy tales tell you is that the dragons and monsters can be beaten,” Gaiman said.

As someone who has written for both adults and children, Gaiman said he really enjoys writing for children. It’s less remunerative, but more challenging, he added.

“Writing for adults, I’m perfectly willing to inflict a description of the weather on them. With kids, I don’t inflict any weather on them at all,” Gaiman said. “With kids, I assume that every word I write counts. I also assume that every word may be read by a tired adult to a kid who’s not going to forget what’s being read.

“On that basis, I’ve got to make sure that every word counts and - with any luck - that every word is pleasant to read.”

Gaiman, who lives in a “Gothic pile” in Minneapolis with his American-born wife and 9-year-old daughter, has written another picture book, Crazy Hair. The book, which also will be illustrated by McKean, is due out in 2005.

He’s also doing some writing for adults. Gaiman recently wrote a screenplay, and is working on a new “Sandman” collection and a new comic series titled 1602.

“I think it actually got to the point where the bootlegs were one of the mainstays of eBay,” Gaiman said by phone from his home near Minneapolis. “There were people sending their children through college with them.”

Neverwhere, which was originally shown on British television in 1996, follows the adventures of Richard Mayhew, a young Scotsman who discovers a hidden civilization in the tunnels under London. The miniseries was released in a two-disc DVD boxed set earlier this month by A&E Home Video, with commentary and a bonus interview by Gaiman. Neverwhere’s cult status comes largely from the fact that the show was written by Gaiman. He is the creator of Sandman, a groundbreaking comic-book series that made its debut in 1989 and ran for seven years. Gaiman created an elaborate mythology for the series built around the Endless, a group of immortal beings who were the embodiments of aspects of humanity - Dream, Death, Desire, Despair and so on. The series was published by DC Comics, and its success helped establish DC’s “Vertigo” line of comics for adult readers.

Before entering the comics business, the British-born Gaiman worked as a writer for various newspapers and magazines. He has also written short stories, novels, two children’s books and several screenplays.

“My favorite of all media is the radio play,” he said. “I get to do things in people’s heads.”

Although radio plays are virtually nonexistent in the United States, they are still common in England.

“But there are so few outlets for them,” Gaiman said. “Plus, writing a movie pays approximately 700 times as much as writing a radio play, and novels pay about a million times as much, so I’m much more likely to write them.”

Gaiman’s novels include an adaptation of Neverwhere, the comedic novel Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett), and American Gods. His first children’s book, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish, was published in 1997.

The novelization of Neverwhere was inspired by the fact that budgetary limitations kept the miniseries from achieving the look he wanted.

“I would write things without worrying about how we were going to do them, and then the TV people had to figure out how to do it on a BBC budget,” he said.

In one example, Gaiman described a subterranean beast as a fierce 12-foot-tall albino boar covered with scars and with the shards of broken weapons imbedded in its hide. “And when it would come on, it would be a cow,” he said with a laugh. He tried to persuade the producers of the miniseries to come up with something scarier.

“Unfortunately, I was outvoted,” he said. “Having said that, the beast, it’s just a minute or so out of a much bigger story. Most people are willing to forgive it.”

In the novel, he didn’t have to worry about such limitations.

“The book was my way of trying get back to sort of a ‘director’s cut,’” he said. “It was the one place where I could write a 12-foot-high albino boar with weapons sticking out of its hide and it came out that way. I had my infinitely high special-effects budget and could put back in every scene they had cut.”

Gaiman retired the Sandman series seven years ago, but he returns to the characters this month with The Sandman: Endless Nights, a hardcover graphic novel.

“It has seven stories done by seven amazing artists,” he said, “including Milo Manara, Bill Sienkiewicz, and P. Craig Russell. These are stories I’ve wanted to do for ages, one for each of the Endless.”

Gaiman was well known for collaborating with artists who did not do traditional superhero comics, and he tailors his stories to the artist he is working with.

“I won’t write the story unless I know who’s drawing it,” he said. “It’s one of the places where you get your ideas from. I say, ‘What would I like to see so-and-so draw?’”

In August, Gaiman started another comic book series. 1602 is his first project for Marvel Comics. It takes familiar Marvel characters such as The X-Men, Spider-Man and Captain America and re-invents them as characters in Elizabethan England.

“That was the fun of it, trying to go back and figure out everything I’d loved about these characters when I was a kid, and then tell a story that stripped off all the baggage,” he said. “I started it right after the 9/11 bombing, and I had this feeling, sort of that I didn’t want to write something with explosions and skyscrapers and guns…. I thought it would be fun to recontextualize everything.”

The first issue of the eight-part miniseries was the top-selling comic in August, beating out such stalwarts as Batman and The Amazing Spider-Man. The second issue is available now.

Moving ahead, Gaiman is optimistic about Jim Henson Studios’ plans for a big-budget remake of Neverwhere.

“I believe they now have a script,” he said. “I wrote a couple of early drafts of the script, and then there came a point where I just felt, having written the TV series and the novel and now several versions, I was in danger of becoming my own word processor. It was probably time for someone else to take over.

Mr. SPIEGELMAN: Right. There’s something also about the sensibility that makes him kind of the inheritor of the Charles Addams tradition somehow.

HANSEN: Exactly. Exactly. Had Neil Gaiman and Gahan Wilson ever worked together before?

Mr. SPIEGELMAN: Actually, it was Neil’s idea, because they wanted to work together and it seemed like, `That’s the perfect place; we can do it here.’

HANSEN: Tell us the story that Neil and Gahan…

Mr. SPIEGELMAN: Oh, it’s about some little kids who want to have a birthday party, and are forbidden from having it at home because too much Jell-O got thrown last time. And the kids decide to have the party in a graveyard. And the noise and music that they make in the graveyard wakes the dead, who come join the party. And a great time is had by both the corpses and the kids before they return home at dawn.

HANSEN: And the corpses are, again, the wonderful green with the one eye and they play cool games like Blind Corpses Bluff and–this is something that kids–I mean, sometimes parents can go `Eww,’ but the kids really love it.

Mr. SPIEGELMAN: Well, it’s all handled so benignly. These are all within that world of the safety zone that’s outside the world of Freddy and Jason movies…